Charities to Plant 25,000 Olive Trees in Palestine

Human Appeal, a British char­ity, has part­nered with two Palestinian non-gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions (NGOs) to plant 25,000 olive trees in the state.

Their goal is to help revive Palestine’s olive indus­try fol­low­ing years of con­flict that have resulted in the destruc­tion of many olive groves.

The project is expected to cover 200,000 square meters and ben­e­fit farms through­out the West Bank. The project is expected to help 200 farm­ers and result in about four tons of olive oil pro­duc­tion annu­ally.

Despite recent con­flict and cli­matic extremes, the International Olive Council esti­mated that Palestine pro­duced 27,000 tons of olive oil in the 2021/22 crop year, 17 per­cent above the rolling five-year aver­age.

Currently, there are more than nine mil­lion olive trees in Palestine, and about 80 per­cent of the olive groves are more than a cen­tury old.

Olive trees hold a spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance in Palestinian cul­ture as they have crit­i­cal eco­nomic, social and national sig­nif­i­cance.

In addi­tion, olive trees are ideal crops for this region due to their abil­ity to with­stand extreme heat, drought, and poor soils com­pared to other crops.

“The olive tree car­ries great sym­bolic impor­tance for the his­tory of Palestinian agri­cul­ture, being syn­ony­mous with Palestine for gen­er­a­tions across the Middle East,” Mohamad Yousef, head of Human Appeal France, told Arab News.

“Olive trees in this part of the world are among the old­est to be found, with some of them over 1,000 years old,” he added.

Olive pro­duc­tion pro­vides income for about 100,000 Palestinian fam­i­lies and cre­ates 25 per­cent of income earned from the agri­cul­tural sec­tor. Almost half of the arable land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is planted with olive trees.

According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, olive oil is the sec­ond-largest Palestinian export after trop­i­cal fruit and brought in €17.1 mil­lion in 2019, the last year for which data are avail­able.

“When seek­ing to pro­vide urgently needed sup­port, it’s vital that we also con­sider pro­vid­ing long-term sup­port to help the pop­u­la­tion help them­selves,” Yousef said.

“Planting these olive saplings is more than secur­ing land for agri­cul­ture and sup­ply­ing a crop that will help these recip­i­ents to sup­port them­selves into the future,” he added. ​“It’s also an impor­tant sym­bol of regrowth for the region.”

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